If at first you don't succeed ...

 All summer long you rooted for him, if your soul was right with God. Cheered him when it looked like ... no, not this time. Muttered "Dammit!" under you breath when it again looked like ... no, not this time, either.

Because Tommy Fleetwood -- not "Tom", not "Thomas", but "Tommy", which fits him like a lambskin glove -- was, oh, my goodness, right there. And also because he was absurdly easy to root for, with his hockey-flow hair and his easy manner and the obvious joy he took in being able to swing a golf club for a living.

Even though the guy hadn't won a PGA Tour event in 163 starts.

Even though he'd finished in the top five 30 times in those 163 starts, the most top five finishes without a win in a PGA event in a century.

Ah, but then came Sunday.

When Tommy Fleetwood came to the last round of the Tour Championship tied for the lead.

When the golf gods looked down, looked at each and other and said "OK. I think we've tortured this guy enough."

And they waved their magic wand or magic 2-iron or whatever it is golf gods wave, and Tommy Fleetwood finally got his first Tour win. And not just his first Tour win, but the Tour win.

Timing is everything. Also perseverance, because If At First You Don't Succeed is Tommy Fleetwood all day long, so is Try, Try Again.

So he went out and put up a 68 in the last round, clearing him by three strokes from the field. He finished 18-under for the tournament. And at day's end, it wasn't some Greater Tire Barn Open trophy he was holding up, but the Fedex Cup itself.

Which only goes to show you that in golf, karma may be a bitch, but occasionally even it gets tired of being so.

Fleetwood's first and most providential win, see, came on the heels of two crazy near-misses this summer. Back in June he was leading the Travelers Championship by a stroke with one hole to play, but then he three-putted the 18th green and a shocked Keegan Bradley ended up posing for the holding-up-the-trophy photos. And then, just two weeks ago in Memphis ...

There Fleetwood was again, on the precipice of victory at the FedEx St. Jude Championship, the first leg of the playoffs. Led by two shots with three holes to play. Finished tied for third after going par-bogey-par on those last three holes -- part of a ruinous endgame that included four bogeys in the last seven holes.

Well, not this time, boys and girls. This time, Tommy Fleetwood brought that puppy home.

"I never really felt like it wouldn't happen," he said later, of his first Tour win. "But there's always doubt there."

Or was.

A media Event

 I once saw a drunk fan get outed by one of my media colleagues.

(And, yes, you could tell the difference. Smartass.)

It was a postgame football presser at Notre Dame, where the Irish had just dispatched West Virginia. Per usual, the visiting coach and a select player or two went first. On this particular day, the player in question was Mountaineers' running back Amos Zereoue, who'd had a big day. And here was Drunk Guy, asking Amos, a darkhorse Heisman candidate, if he thought he should win the thing.

Now, we're not always a perceptive bunch, we media folk. But we immediately knew Drunk Guy wasn't one of us. Somehow he'd slipped past the diligent ND gendarmes, and he stuck out like a sore thumb.

The aforementioned media colleague -- a Notre Dame grad who'd been covering the Irish for decades -- promptly commenced with the outing.

"Who are you working for?" he demanded.

Drunk Guy mumbled something about the student newspaper.

"Bullshit," our hero said, or words to that effect. And then called over the gendarmes to remove the clown.

I bring all this up because of something I saw on the website Awful Announcing the other day, which made me both remember Drunk Guy and struggle not to retch.

Out in Norman, Okla., it seems, Oklahoma football has hit on a new way to pick the pockets of its fan base, as if it's not vacuuming up enough of its dollars already. For the low, low price of $692.11, fans will now be allowed to sit in on head coach Brent Venables' postgame pressers. Drunk Guy has gone legit, in other words.

I can't tell you how wrong that is. I mean, I can, but I'm not sure you'd get it.

So let me begin by pointing out the line between sportswriter and fanboy has always been the third rail of our profession, and woe betide anyone who crossed it. A poop storm of contempt from his or her colleagues is the reward for doing so.

This is not because we're mean, heartless creatures who love to make fun of everyone and everything. I mean, we are, but that's not why fanboy "journalists" in particular draw our wrath.

It's because we're a tribe, and the tribe has standards, believe it not. You don't cheer in the pressbox (although derisive laughter is permitted when Coach Slobberknocker runs his fullback up the middle on third-and-12). You never refer to the team you're covering as "we". You try to maintain at least a modicum of professionalism, even if you're wearing a Burgville Bugler shirt so old the mustard stains qualify as an exciting archeological find.

Now, I get it. It's all different these days. You've got Blobs and podcasts and fan sites that have so blurred that aforementioned inviolate line you can barely see it anymore. The tribe may still be the tribe, its standards may still be standard, but the barbarians are no longer at the gates. They're inside the damn things, running amok.

So, sure, why not let fans into the inner sanctum of a postgame presser, especially if you can soak the hell out of  'em for the privilege? Why not turn a workplace -- our workplace, dammit -- into just another piece of the Complete Sooner Experience? Everything else is an Event these days, why not this?

I'll tell you why: Because we're not dancing monkeys, here to entertain the paying customers. Because no one sells tickets to open-heart surgery ... or lets Joe Blow From Kokomo, for a nominal fee, drive a backhoe on a construction site ... or gives Buddy Bill From Hooterville (for a nominal fee) a chance to hover over a bomb squad guy while he defuses an IED.

"Gee, Mr. Overreaction," you're saying now. "Little sensitive, aren't you? None of those are the same thing and you know it."

No, they're not. And perhaps I am a bit sensitive. But it's the principle, see.

The only saving grace?

The price tag, of course. What damn fool is going to shell out almost $700 to watch us ask Brent Venables questions? 

Ooh, look, Martha. The guy from the Burgville Bugle just asked Coach if he was a tree, what kind of tree would he be? What a stupid question! And just look at how the Burgville Bugle guy is DRESSED!

Why, I bet that mustard stain is older than Grover Cleveland. Goodness.

A silly (greedy) idea

 College football opened up this weekend with Iowa State beating Kansas State in Ireland, Hawaii beating Stanford in Hawaii and various Kansases, UNLVs and Western Kentuckys winning in other locales. We're off and sorta running.

Guess that means it's time for the Blob to address the Big Ten's latest harebrained scheme, which is to more than double the size of the College Football Playoff and make the entire deal even more of a joke than it might already be.

The Big Jon And Kate Plus 8 rolled out a plan recently to take the current 12-team CFP to as many as 28 teams, which is both silly and -- hello -- greedy. This is because under the Big Ten's construct, guess who would get the most automatic qualifiers?

Thaaat's right, class: The Big Ten. Oh, and the SEC, the other Godzilla of college football. 

The visionaries in the Big Ten see a field comprised of seven automatic qualifiers apiece from the Godzillas; five apiece from the sorry-ass ACC and Big 12; two for cruds like the MAC and the Mountain West; and two at-large teams (i.e., Notre Dame, and Notre Dame). To cram in all the extra games, conference championship tilts would be cast into outer darkness.

"But that only eliminates one weekend of games, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "What are they gonna do, play 'til Washington's birthday?"

Nah. My guess is they'll make a whole lot of previously undistinguished bowl games Official College Football Playoff Games.

The Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl? Playoff game! SERVPRO First Responder Bowl? Playoff! Radial tire bowls, lawn implement bowls, the Scooter's Coffee Frisco Bowl?

Playoff, playoff, playoff. It's a veritable Playoffpalooza y'all!

Of course, most of the extra 16 teams the Big Ten wants to add to the CFP won't remotely belong there, but, hey, it's all about the Benjamins for the Power Four. The Big Ten and SEC in particular already sit on entire mountain ranges of cash, but when has more ever been enough in the corporate era of college football?

So, sure, let's invite, um, Minnesota to the big spellin' bee. The Golden Gophers finished seventh in the Big Ten last year, which means, under the Big Plan, they'd get in, even though they barely finished above .500 (5-4) in the conference. But they crushed Nevada and Rhode Island, so they're worthy, right?

Ay-yi-yi. 

You can see now why practically everyone has been bashing this notion as stupid and unworkable -- including Rece Davis on ESPN's College Football Countdown, who the other day called it "absurd." Proponents (i.e.: The Big Ten) might argue that the 68-team NCAA basketball tournament includes a lot of un-worthies, too, but basketball is not football. In the former, two or three players on a given night can level the playing field between a Little and a Big; in the latter, the enormous resources required to field a powerhouse make that virtually impossible.

In other words, a Fairleigh Dickinson ain't beatin' a Purdue in the CFP. Or, say, a Toledo beatin' an Alabama.

"Well, what about Northern Illinois beating Notre Dame last year?" you're saying now. "Or all those MAC schools who regularly beat Big Ten schools every year?"

They do that in September. In January, in the CFP? Not a chance.

But, hey. Think how much money the Big Ten will make off Minnesota's 35-12 loss to Georgia in the first round. Cha-ching, baby!

Domain change

 The lord of all creation is surveying his domain this morning from the roof of our car, and never mind that his domain is the parking lot of a Ramada Inn. You take what you get when the rising sun is scattering jewels across the Straits of Mackinac, and making giant's shadows of pickups and SUVs and even our humble Hyundai Sonata.

On a morning this glorious, what you get is more than enough. Even if you're, you know, a seagull.

There he stands, looking regal and very white against the dark blue of our Sonata, and not a little disdainful. Trudging earthbound humans pack-mule their luggage around and past him, and his beady little eye misses none of it. His silent judgment: What sad creatures these are.

I can't say I'm thinking the same this morning, although I could. There are sad creatures  everywhere in the land these days, and we all know where the saddest (and strangest) abide.

No, what I'm thinking about are domains, and if a seagull on the roof of our car is a damn tortured segue into that, so be it. I never claimed to have a linear mind, or even one that works more than intermittently. 

So let's talk domains. Specifically, the shifting of one to another.

It's been coming for a few weeks now, but last night and this weekend are the official handoff. The season that belonged to baseball and motorsports and golf is going away; the season of football is upon us.

It struck me when I went online this morning and checked out what happened Friday on green fields beneath a Broadway blaze of lights, and realized I hadn't done that in nine months. That's because high school football in Indiana officially began a new season last night, and today Kansas State plays Iowa State in Dublin, Ireland, and here we go, here we go.

Fall is here, defying the calendar as brazenly as ever. Summer is down to the dregs. . The domain of baseball and car racing and golf has become the domain of football's Goliath, and it has happened, as it always does, literally overnight.

And so here I am, cruising the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette website to see how my New Haven Bulldogs did. Oh, great, crushed 41-0 by Northrop at home. And, look, Leo beat Bishop Luers 14-7 in the marquee game of the night. Carroll, Bishop Dwenger, Concordia? 

All lost to stinkin' Indy schools, doggone it.

What else? Oh, here's East Noble paving Wayne 42-0, signaling the Knights are done yet after their state finals run last year. Bellmont and Norwell got ball-peened by Heritage and Mississinewa, perhaps signaling more losses to come in the thorny Northeast 8. And defending 2A state champ Adams Central got past Garrett 7-0 down in Monroe, because ... well, because they're Adams Central.

And today?

Week 0 in college football. Prelude to opening weekend. Kansas State vs. Iowa State in Dublin -- a damned odd place for two corn-belt schools to wind up, but what the hey. Go get 'em, you lads from Kansas. Have at it, you boyos from Iowa. May the rains fall gently on your fields of waving grain, even if the Iowa Staters will have to explain all this Cyclone business.

Domain change, too, perhaps. But not here, by golly. Not here.

A brief interlude

 EMPIRE, Mich. -- Up here at the top of the bluff, the sun is warm and the breeze is cool and the views are pure Monet, or perhaps Winslow Homer. Lake Michigan is as blue as it has been in my dreams, as Red says at the end of "The Shawshank Redemption." This morning it's a looking glass giving back the color of the sky, and it stretches on forever.

So, yeah, I will sit here for awhile, gorging my senses. Straight west, beyond the horizon, is Wisconsin and Door County. Off to the north is the low rise of Manitou Island, and the bone-white incline of Sleeping Bear's mountainous dune, tumbling down to all that blue.

I'd say "Ahhh" if it wouldn't make me sound totally dorkazoid. So maybe I just say it to myself.

And also: I needed this. All of this.

I needed me some northern Michigan, my favorite place on earth and a thing of the blood, because my parents loved it first. Built a home on Lake Huron when they retired, and lived there for 25 years. My dad, a history nerd and master woodworker, even got a job with the Mackinac State Parks Commission at Old Mill Creek, site of an 18th century British sawmill.

Every day he'd drive into Mackinaw City and mess around with wood all day, using 18th-century tools. Getting a leg up on heaven, pure and simple.

But my dad is gone now and so is my mom, and their house on Huron is up for sale again. And I'm just sitting here filling my lungs with air that smells like pine and clean water, and which I can sometimes ... almost ... smell back at home when the wind's right.

This is the real thing, however. My wife and I fled the dryer-vent heat of Indiana a couple of days ago for a week in God's country, and already northern Michigan is working its magic. For a blessed while I can forget about the world and how utterly mad it's become.

I can forget, for instance, that the nation I love is in the hands of a pack of loony meatheads in thrall to a half-mad old man with delusions of emperorhood. Nero, you might say, without the violin lessons. 

His latest bright idea -- enthusiastically endorsed by his Homeland Security czar Magda Gerbils (aka, Kristi Noem) -- is to paint the Big Beautiful Border Wall black to heat it up and thwart climbers. This won't stop all the folks who choose to go under the Wall rather than over it, but never mind that. Magda thinks it's the latest swell idea from the mind of a genius.

Yeesh. Calgon, take me away.

Or rather, northern Michigan, take me away.

Take me to the top of this bluff on a glorious bluebird day, and then, after a time, back down the trail into the cool woods. Down there the sun is doing its dapple thing through the leaves, and you meet other trekkers and their dogs making the not-so-long slog up toward the bluff. They say hi to you and you say hi to them and their puppers, and then you're alone under the trees again and the quiet is bone deep.

Which is to say, unless something momentous happens, the Blob is checking out for a day or two. You may talk among yourselves, but no gum-chewing.

Me?

I'll just take another deep breath. Ahhh.

The future is nah

 So, then: Daniel Jones.

Which I guess means the Era of "Meh" continues in Indianapolis.

Which I guess also means the Colts are throwing in the towel on Anthony Richardson.

Which I guess also means, unavoidably, that Chris Ballard and the rest of the Horseshoes' brain trust are admitting they blew the Big Draft Pick, because the erstwhile future of the franchise is now holding a clipboard with third-stringer Riley Leonard behind Danny Dimes -- who's frankly little more than a placeholder until the next Big Draft Pick (cough, Arch Manning, cough) shows up.

Beaten out of a job by Daniel Jones.

Who saw that coming back in the palmy days when the Colts made AR the fourth pick in the 2023 NFL Draft, and everyone was raving about the kid's stratospheric ceiling?

I'll take "no one" for $200, Alex.

Anthony Richardson was an effervescent kid with a big arm and jaw-dropping athleticism, and so everyone sort of forgot he was also barely two years out of high school when he was drafted and had started just 13 games as a quarterback in college. They sort of forgot, subsequently, that his big arm was still in the prototype stage, and that he did not come to Indy fully charged and ready for use?

"Hell, just look at him!" the brain trust cried, or so it seemed. "He's a heat-and-serve superstar-to-be! Coupla OTAs and training camp and he'll be good to go!"

And so the very first NFL official game Anthony Richardson played in, he started.

And then, four games into the 2023 season, he got hurt and was done for the year.

And then, in 2024, he got hurt a couple more times, and was benched for awhile, and took a powder in the middle of a game. He wound up his second season completing just 47 percent of his passes, which is quite a trick considering the NFL is so tilted in favor of the passing game Uncle Rico could complete half his throws just by showing up.

In other words, AR played exactly like a green-as-grass kid who'd barely taken a snap since high school. And who consequently never, ever, ever should have been thrown directly into the fire. 

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Who else did the Colts have? The quarterback room was Anthony Richardson and the ghost of Sammy Baugh. They really didn't have a choice."

Perhaps. But whose fault was that? 

Truth is, the Future Is Now has become the Future Is "Nah," and the people most at fault for that are the people who were entrusted with Richardson's development. They utterly failed him, and now Richardson is damaged goods who'll likely be traded down the road for whatever the Colts can get for him.

And the QB roulette that's been spinning madly since Andrew Luck decided he still wanted to walk by the time he was 30 will spin on. Danny Dimes is no answer, but he's the only one the Colts have left themselves for now. Head coach Shane Steichen said the other day he's their starter for the season -- which, given the Ballard regime's handling of quarterbacks, no doubt means exactly what you think it means.

Riley Leonard, start warming up.

A most immodest proposal

 Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred tossed a hand grenade into the bouillabaisse the other day, and, no, it wasn't admitting the whole ghost-runner-in-extra-innings thing was a lint-brained idea. Although it was.

No, sir. This time Rob let it slip that perhaps it was time to turn the entire game upside down, dump all the pieces and radically rearrange them.

He said -- perhaps -- the day would soon come when MLB completely re-organized itself along geographical lines, changing the entire landscape the way an 8.5 quake would change the landscape of, say, L.A. In other words, the Cubs and White Sox would be in the same division. Ditto the Mets and Yankees. Ditto, I don't know, the Guardians and Reds, the Royals and the Cardinals, the Orioles and Nationals, the Rangers and Astros.

"Hey, what about us?" the Seattle Mariners might ask. "We're up here all alone in the Pacific Northwest."

"And what about us?" the Colorado Rockies might chime in. "The Front Range gets mighty lonely at night."

The answer could be, MLB will add a team in Eugene and perhaps a team in Puyallup (Hey, look, it's the Puyallup Fightin' Polyps!) to keep the Mariners company. The Rockies, meanwhile, will be sent back to Triple A where they belong.

Anyway, this is a radical notion Manfred let run free, even more radical than the ghost runner. Whether or not it would be as unnecessary and stupid -- well, who knows? 

What we do know is it would completely bumfuzzle the geezers who still watch baseball, provoking the usual consarn-its and shaking of bony fists. On the other hand, as Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay pointed out on his radio show the other day, if it made interleague play superfluous, it might be worth all the chaos.

Interleague play, Kay believes, has ruined the All-Star Game, and also the World Series. This is an undisputable fact, at least in the Blob's estimation. When everyone plays everyone all the time, the intrigue is gone. And the intrigue -- whose style of baseball is superior, the AL's or the NL's? -- is a lot of what made the All-Star Game and World Series worth watching.

Now, the All-Star Game and Series are just a bunch of players who've already played against one another half a dozen times. Takes all the fun out of it.

So, what the hell. Let Manfred's most immodest proposal become reality. Baseball probably isn't so far gone it requires such a complete teardown, but let's face it: The joint is looking pretty shabby these days.

I say go for it. I mean, as a geezer myself, I still think the Astros are in the National League and the Brewers are in the American half the time. So the bumfuzzlement train has already left the station where I'm concerned.

Besides, I like shaking my bony fist and shouting "Consarnit!" every so often. It's one of life's pleasures in these advancing days.

Jumping to something

 Watched Caleb Williams take the new-look Chicago Bears on a 92-yard joyride against the Buffalo Bills last night, saw him blow it in for six on a laser to Olamide Zaccheaus, and subsequently heard a lot of media types saying OMIGOD THIS IS THE CALEB WILLIAMS WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR as they tried not to get hurt falling over themselves.

Immediately I thought, "Uh-oh."

This is not because I'm a cranky old fart who enjoys raining on parades. OK, I am, but not in this case.

In this case, it's because, back of all of the above, I could hear the steel-toed tramp of that most dreaded of media afflictions, Jumping To Conclusions. Or at the very least Jumping To Something.

Listen. What everyone saw from Caleb Williams might indeed mean he's going to bloom like a rose in an English garden under the guidance of new head coach Ben Johnson.  Could be he'll actually become a for-real QB1, which Chicago hasn't seen since ...

Well, let's be honest. They've never seen it, at least in my lifetime.

Anyway, everything people were saying about Caleb Williams after last night they're also saying about Jaxson Dart, who's been tearing it up in the preseason for the New York Giants. Or for Shedeur Sanders, who looked nothing like a fifth-round draft pick in his first big stint for the Cleveland Browns, and who likely has the best potential skill set in that overcrowded quarterback room.

However.

However, allow Mr. Cloudburst to point out the obvious.

These are preseason games. That means no one's showing their full hand, scheme or otherwise. It also means everyone's playing mix-and-match lineups that look yea different from the lineups they'll be rolling out in Week 1. 

In 2006, for instance, the year the Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bowl, Peyton Manning 'n' them went 1-3 in the preseason. They were also 1-3 in the preseason in 2009, when they again went to the Super Bowl but lost to New Orleans.

In 2006, their regular-season record was 12-4. In 2009, it was 14-2.

But back to Williams.

He did what he did not against the Bills, really, but against the Sorta Bills. This is because the actual Bills were sitting this one out. It was a major reason Williams and Co. paved 'em 38-0.

What that tells us is twofold.

One, Williams likely will thrive under the new system. Last night he spread the ball around to a bunch of receivers, including tight ends Cole Kmet and Colston Loveland. He looked comfortable and focused and, as Johnson noted, "locked in." two?

And two?

The Bills' backups aren't very good. Or if they are, they were saving it for the regular season.

In other words: Stay tuned, everyone.

As ever.

Punishment, fazed

 The NCAA landed on Michigan's shady football program with both feet yesterday, and there was much relief and (dare we say it) perhaps even rejoicing in Ann Arbor. This is because it doesn't hurt much these days when the NCAA lands on you with both feet, the feet in question being swaddled in fuzzy bunny slippers.

It's a gelded entity now, the NCAA. A velvet fist in a velvet glove, to extend the metaphor to another appendage.

And so Michigan has to pay fines that could exceed $30 million for Scoutgate and other assorted crimes from the sordid Jim Harbaugh Regime, and it will face some restrictions on recruiting, and a bunch of then-assistant coaches who no longer work in college football were assessed show-cause penalties. This includes the aforementioned Harbaugh, who's currently serving a four-year show-cause and got hit with an additional 10-year jolt.

Which no doubt stung like the proverbial wet noodle now that he's safely back in the NFL.

"Oh, whatever will I do!" one can imagine Harbaugh crying out there in L.A., mock-clutching his pearls.

This was not exactly the reaction in Ann Arbor, although it likely wasn't far off. The take there seemed to be that $30 million or so for a national title was a sweet deal, tainted though that national title will forever be.

Not that U of M fans care, though they should. But shame being as extinct as the dodo these days, a ring is a ring, no matter how acquired. And so the NCAA is like Miss Shields from "A Christmas Story", trying in vain to suss out who baited Flick into sticking his tongue on that flagpole.

"Those who did it know their blame," quoth Miss Shields/the NCAA. "And I'm sure that the guilt you feel is far worse than any punishment you might receive."

As if.

To be sure, it's a different day now, and the NCAA is just another entity driven by the profit margin, overseeing a professional enterprise in which the crimes of yesteryear are merely bidness as usual.  Everyone's out to get theirs, and the landscape is full of young men and women riding the transfer portal rails in search of the tastiest deal. Rules violations? Quaint as rotary phones.

And so why not hit the Wolverines athletic department with an up-to-$30 mill fine it will recoup by, oh, say, next Tuesday? Or tell an NFL head coach he can't be a college head coach anymore ("No Bemidji State for you, Jimbo!")? Or suspend current Michigan coach Sherrone Moore for an extra game next season, in addition to the two Michigan self-imposed on Moore this season?

Which will be Central Michigan and Nebraska, by the way. The Oklahoma game he'll get to coach, being one of those marquee deals and all. 

Some would call that not so much a punishment phase as punishment, fazed. Most of them, by odd coincidence, live in Ohio.

At any rate, in the NCAA's czarist days, the powers-that-then-were would have gone much more over-the-top, or so one can assume. They might have stripped the Wolverines of their national title, for starters. They might have made them vacate a clutch of Ws and hit them with a multi-year postseason ban. Not even Michigan's self-imposed punishment would have cut much ice.

And in Ann Arbor, they'd have been screaming and rending their garments instead of halfway celebrating.

Me?

Sometimes I actually miss the screaming and rending of garments. I'm weird that way.

Pays your money ...

 ... and takes your chance.

That's how it goes, right?

And so here I am sitting in a local establishment the other day, and the guy next to me is playing Texas Hold-Em or something on his phone, and the guy on the other side of me is cruising some FanDrool betting site on his phone, and up there on the TV behind the bar I see something FanDrool guy might be interested in.

It's a betting line on the crawl at the bottom of the screen.

It's telling me the Ravens are a 1.5-point favorite to beat the Cowboys in their preseason game Saturday.

In their preseason game.

And right away I'm wondering what kind of sad cases bet NFL preseason games, and then I stop wondering. A guy who scrolls FanDrool at 5:45 on a weekday afternoon, that's who. Or some other guy who bets, I don't know, professional cornhole or NBA summer league games or the Little League World Series, which is happening right now in Williamsport, Pa.

Don't laugh. I mean, you just know there's a line for the latter somewhere, Panama vs. the field or some such thing. And someone's dropping some coin on it as we speak.

Look. I know the country's completely lost what little mind it had, what with Training Wheels Mussolini sending troops to occupy American cities because he saw some homeless folk on the way to the golf course. And don't even get me started on the Great And Terrible Oz's plan to turn the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts into the Kennedy Center for Eighties Hair Bands.

But a betting line on preseason NFL football?

Well, I never. 

I never, because, seriously, is there anything in the wide, wide world of sports more mortally lame than the NFL preseason? Sure, we've heard all the stories about the down-roster rook from Directional Hyphen State who made the club with a big day in the Hall of Fame game. But those stories are as old as cave drawings.

With the preseason down to three games, and with all the mini-camps and controlled scrimmages and reams of data available on players these days, NFL coaching staffs pretty much know who can play and who can't by the time they step on the field for that first preseason game. Or at least the good coaching staffs do. Heck, it's not even a shake-off-the-rust deal anymore.

So if you're betting on preseason games, you're mainly betting on a bunch of guys who won't be on the roster come Monday morning. And what's the point of that?

"Who says there has to be a point?" replies FanDrool guy, going all-in on the Cowboys to beat the spread, and on Jimmy Jerome from Waydown Home to rush for at least 70 yards. 

Well. Alrighty then.

That day

 Eighty years now since it all ended, and again I'm in Della Nichter's living room on the south side of Fort Wayne, listening to her story. Again she's showing me a tattered piece of flimsy lovingly sheathed in plastic, 32 terrible words partly obscured by faded pink splotches.

The tattered piece of flimsy is a telegram. 

The faded pink splotches are Della's lipstick, decades old now.

The 32 words under the splotches begin this way: The Secretary of War asked me to express his deep regret ...

That's how Della Nichter found out her then-husband, a P-38 pilot with the 14th Air Force named Robert M. Bentz, had been killed in action in China on July 27, 1945.

The serviceman bearing the telegram arrived on Della Nichter's doorstep on August 13, 1945, about 7:30 in the evening.

The next day, Japan formerly surrendered, ending the most destructive war in human history. By 7:30 in the evening on the 13th, though, word had already gotten out, and outside the city was losing its mind, everyone dancing in the streets and laughing and  who knows what all.

The war they called Big Two was over. But on Della Nichter's doorstep, it had only just come home.

She was 21 years old with a 2-year-old daughter and an infant son she wasn't even sure her husband knew about, and now he was gone and she was a widow with a truckload of grief to carry around. She was hardly alone in that, of course. In America and Europe and Asia and, well, everywhere, really, there were millions bearing that same truckload of grief, mourning the millions more whose lives had vanished without a trace.

War is hell and you can't refine it, that man of war William Tecumseh Sherman once said. It is death and ruin and more death and yet more death, so much death it seems all the graveyards on earth cannot hold it. It is filth and stench and every vileness human beings are capable of when they're compelled to stop behaving like human beings.

And, yes: It is also victory. Peace, temporary though it may be. The crushing of tyranny, temporary though that may be. 

But if it's important to commemorate all that on this 80th anniversary of V-J Day, it's also important to remember how it was bought. It's important to remember a young mother in the Midwest feeling the price of victory, the sacrifice it demands, even as the celebrations went on.

"It was like I turned to ice," Della Nichter recalled, when I visited her 30 years ago. It had been half-a-century then since those 32 words arrived, but she remembered every detail, could see it all as if it was happening even as we spoke.

Taking the telegram from the serviceman. Watching him almost flee her front step. Walking into the dining room, laying the telegram carefully on the table, saying to herself, You know, when I open that telegram, I won't have Bob anymore.

And so she didn't. 

And so in time the truckload of grief would ease, and soften into the ache of memory. Della's children would grow, and she would meet a World War II  vet named Eugene Nichter, and they would share a long life together. And if V-J Day would always mean something different to her than to everyone else, there was a small victory to be had even for her.

From the piece I wrote 30 years for the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette:

A few years after the war, she met an Okinawa veteran named Eugene Nichter, and they have been happily married since. And just a few years ago, her son, Bob, the one she was nursing that long-ago August evening, contacted his father's old flight leader, who told him Robert Bentz had known about young Bob after all.

So, yes, there is a happy ending for sorts, to the 13 Aug. 1945 of Della Nichter. There is indeed. 

It comes by way of a message delivered to to 2/Lt. Bentz Robt. M., as he sat on the flight line in Kunming, China, on the last day of his life. It comes in the vision of Robert Bentz standing bolt upright in his cockpit and tossing his hat, and then screaming for joy at the Chinese sky:

"It's a boy!"

Second-class, again

 At least there's this, if you're the red-headed stepchild that is IndyCar racing: Second place still gets you on the podium.

Which is to say FOX Sports dissed Alex Palou, Pato O'Ward and the gang again on Sunday, for the second week in a row. IndyCar was forced to push back its start in Portland 37 minutes because Fox was sticking with the latest LIV golf exhibition, another of the properties Fox owns.

Seems the LIV event went extra holes, and Fox, rather than switching to the race, stayed with the golf. Some guy named Dean beat Jon Rahm and some guy named Josele for the win in the playoff.

Meanwhile, Fox gave IndyCar the old "Yeah, yeah, we'll get to you, just hold your horses" treatment. Which likely surprised some folks in Portland, because FOX Sports had made such a big deal about buying the TV rights last winter, and further demonstrated its commitment by last month buying a $135 million stake in Penske Entertainment, which runs the IndyCar show.

Portland, in fact, was Fox's first broadcast as an official stakeholder. But, wait, first let's make sure our audience doesn't miss Dean Something's epic golf win.

Needless to say, this was not a popular decision in the paddock at Portland. Especially after the IndyCar start at Laguna Seca also got  pushed back because Fox was doing something else.

"This is the second time this has happened," Scott Dixon said Sunday, voicing the general sentiment among both IndyCar participants and fans. "I'm really disappointed in the way Fox handled IndyCar. It feels like we're being pushed aside."

Or at the very least, co-opted. Dixon, in fact, called FOX Sports buying a stake in IndyCar a "disaster," and he wasn't alone. It means Fox now has more control over the product than even broadcast rights traditionally give a network. Prioritizing a golf exhibition tour hardly anyone watches immediately suggests that sort of control will not be a good thing for IndyCar.

In which case, Dixon might not be as over-the-top as he sounded when he used the D-word to describe this stakeholder business.

Doubtless some of that had to with the fact it's Roger Penske and Co. who run IndyCar, and Dixon drives for Penske's longtime rival Chip Ganassi. But FOX Sports buying a stake in the series means FOX Sports is going to be around for awhile, and if it wants to treat IndyCar as a second-class citizen, then a second-class citizen is what IndyCar will be for that same while.

Which is familiar ground for IndyCar, unfortunately.

Its reign as the premier motorsports series in America ended with the mid-1990s divorce between Tony George and CART, and the concurrent rise of NASCAR. It's been No. 2 ever since. Even NASCAR's own diminished market share, and the recent influx of dazzling new talent in IndyCar, have failed to tip the scales in the latter's favor.

Partly this is because entertainment choices have exploded in the last 30 years. But let's be honest here: Mostly it's because IndyCar has consistently displayed an abiding talent for getting in its own way.

So, yeah, the second tier seems to be its home, again. Or still. Whether it likes it or not, IndyCar is the guy who shows up every week dressed to the nines -- top hat, tails,  the whole package -- only to be seated at table 27 back by the service elevator.

Damn shame, that. And damn FOX Sports thoroughly, while we're at it.

But, hey. At least on Fox, we'll never have to miss a single Dean Something wedge. So we've got that going for us.

Cruds alert!

 And now to check in with the Kings of Krud, the Avatars of Awfulness, the Tsars of Tsippity-Doo-Doo ... 

I'm sorry, what?

No, we're not talking about the Chicago What Sox, who remain terrible at baseball but not as epically terrible as they were in, say, 2024.

And, no, we're not talking about the Connecticut Sun of the WNBA, who are 5-26 and 21 1/2 games behind first-place Minnesota, which is pretty remarkable when you consider no one in the league has played more than 32 games.

So who are we talking about?

Why, the enfeebled Colorado Rockheads, of course!

Who to date are 58 games under .500 (30-88), and in the midst of another patent-pending eight-game losing streak. They are the Sultans of Suckage, these Rockheads. The High Priests of Putridity. If the baseball season were the Oregon Trail, the Rockheads' bones would already be bleaching in the sun, a warning to all those foolish enough to attempt a major-league season with beer-league talent.

Why, if baseball were Premier League soccer, they'd have already been relegated in favor of, say, the Hagerstown (Md.) Flying Boxcars.* Or maybe the Gastonia (N.C.) Ghost Peppers.*

(*Actual teams in the actual Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, an actual independent minor league)

Just how hopeless are our Rockheads?

Well, besides being 58 games under .500, they're also 37 1/2 games out of first in the National League West. Heck, they're 26 1/2 games out of next to last. And they're 17 games behind the second-worst team in the league, the not-as-Cruddy-but-still-Cruddy Washington Nationals.

Cruddiest team in the NL by 17 games! Goodness gracious, Rob Manfred, put 'em out of their misery already.

Imagined letter from the office of the commissioner:

To: The Colorado Rockheads, er, Rockies

From: Rob Manfred

Dear Rockheads, er, Rockies

OK, O-KAY. You've made your point. You can quit now.

Go play golf. Go play pinochle. Go play the Daily Double. Just don't do it here.

Oh, yeah: And enjoy those trips to Beloit and Cedar Rapids next summer after I relegate your asses.

I can do that, you know. I'm the Commish. I can do anything I want, even put an MLB team in Vegas.

Later, losers.

Right? 

There is some solace, though, with the dog days of August baseball upon us. There's still an outside chance the Rockheads could avoid breaking the What Sox's year-old record for modern-day futility. All they have to do is go 12-32 the rest of the way, and they'll finish with 42 wins, one more than the Sox managed in their 41-121 horror show in 2024.

"As if!" you're saying now.

Oh ye of little faith.

King Alex

 There remain two races to run in the 2025 IndyCar season, but Alex Palou -- a man in a perpetual hurry -- operates by his own calendar. And according to his own by-God agenda.

Which is to say, King Alex effectively rung down the curtain on 2025 out in Portland, Ore., yesterday, finishing third to clinch his third straight IndyCar title and fourth in the last five years.

Which is also to say, yes, that was him taking a brief sidetrip into the gravel in a hub-to-hub drag race with Christian Lundgaard with four laps to go, trying to steal a second-place finish he didn't need.

Racers gonna race, in other words. And in IndyCar, Alex Palou is the one untouchable racer right now.

This latest podium was his 12th top-five finish in 15 races, to go with eight wins. Only Al Unser Sr. and A.J. Foyt (10 each) have ever won more in a season, and the last time it happened was more than half a century ago. With two races left, Palou could still make it a three-way tie if he goes back-to-back to finish the campaign.

Will he give it a go? Of course he'll give it a go. Racers gonna race, remember?

Yesterday he knew the title was his again 22 laps in, when Pato O'Ward -- the only driver within striking distance of him, and the Portland polesitter -- lost power and had to be pushed to his pit. By the time O'Ward's crew got his McLaren working again, he was nine laps down, and whatever hope he had of keeping alive even a faint pursuit of Palou was gone.

And yet ...

And yet there was Palou, doing a little off-tracking that made team owner Chip Ganassi's heart skip a beat or two.

Not that he was going to give his ace grief about it. 

"Like Alex said, we go into this race with that 10 car team ... every race, we want to win the race, OK? That's how we got to this point," Ganassi said, with the next thing to a shrug in his voice.

Racers gonna race. So King Alex didn't lift, and Lundgaard didn't lift, and a mere flicker ahead of them, Will Power didn't lift, either, and took the checkers. It was the first win of the year for Team Penske, which has had a perfectly awful year and (according to the track chatter) is about to dump the man who saved Roger Penske from his first winless season in 26 years.

Sunday was his 44th IndyCar or Champ Car win in 20 full seasons, all but three of them with Penske. He's been the best of the team's stable this season, sitting sixth in the points.

All of which will make it damned interesting when Team Penske either doesn't re-sign him, or he jumps to another team in anticipation of same.

Meanwhile ...

Meanwhile, here is Alex Palou, who won four of the first five races of the season -- including the Indianapolis 500, the last prize that had eluded him -- to essentially kill the suspense by the end of May. Only three other drivers in history have three-peated in IndyCar: Dario Franchitti, Sebastien Bourdais and, way back in the mists of time, Ted Horn.

All of them must move over now to make room for Palou -- who's still only 28 years old, and so presumably has several more IndyCar championships in his future provided Formula 1 doesn't steal him away.

Until, or if, that happens, it's King Alex's world. And everyone else is just livin' in it.

Dog bites man

 ... or, to put it another way: ESPN is now a partly owned subsidiary of the NASH-unal FOOT-ball League (as Howard Cosell used to enunciate it).

"Oh, no, Mr. Blob!" you're saying now, with a note of alarm. "Is this the death rattle for Real Journalism in America? Is this where we're headed, corporate oligarchies (or the federal government, a corporate oligarchy itself these days) gobbling up media entities in order to keep 'em quiet?"

Welll ...

Yes and no.

Yes, the current autocratic Regime is death on any number of democratic ideals, and among those is freedom of the press -- which it's openly trying to squash through co-option, coercion and outright blackmail. Want that Great Big Honkin' merger to go through? Get critics of the Regime off your payroll. Thaat's a good boy, CBS/Paramount.

But enough about Stephen Colbert.

This is about ESPN and the NFL, whose own  Great Big Honkin' deal this week gave ESPN ownership of the NFL Network and other NFL media assets. In exchange, the NFL gets a 10% equity stake in ESPN. Which means the NFL now partly owns one of the major media companies that cover it.

This makes you wonder if ESPN will now be just another mouthpiece for Roger Goodell 'n' them, kinda like Karoline Leavitt is the mouthpiece for the Regime. And with about as much credibility.

The Blob's admittedly snarky response: "So pretty much like before, right?"

Because, listen, ESPN's been an NFL toady for awhile now, and if you were under the impression otherwise, you never heard the two Mikes' smarmy interviews with Goodell on their now long-defunct drive-time radio show. They were basically infomercials for the league, those interviews; all that was missing was Joe Namath telling you to call the toll-free number on your screen for additional Medicare benefits.

Truth is, ESPN has for the most part stopped doing real journalism, or at least shoved it several rungs down the priority ladder. Now it's just Stephen A. Smith, when he's not teasing a run for the White House, yelling at whoever he yells at these days. It's Greeny doing whatever it is Greeny does.  

Outside the Lines, ESPN's excellent investigative platform?

Gone.

Around the Horn? 

Also gone -- perhaps because it featured too many icky real-life sports journalists.

And, OK, so maybe that's a little unfair. A little. But the truth is, ESPN now officially being partly owned by the NFL really is a dog-bites-man deal. If it calls into question what ESPN will do if it comes out Goodell is getting kickbacks from traumatic brain injury docs ("Keep those paying customers comin', Rog!") ... well, that horse fled the barn awhile ago. The Great Big Honkin' deal just makes the conflicts of interest easier to see now. 

Which makes it more likely than ever ESPN's audience will raise more than an eyebrow at anything the World Wide Leader reports, should bad news indeed come down the NFL pike. Every Great Big Honkin' deal has its price, after all, and credibility and trust are ESPN's in this one.

If that at all matters to them anymore.

Same old sequel

 I am not nor have I ever been a member of the Indianapolis Colts front office, but I think I know what I'd be doing right now if I were.

I'd be hiring a new script writer.

The current one, it seems, hasn't had an original thought in years, which is why what happened last night in Baltimore was so achingly familiar. It was yet another depressing sequel, is what it was, and it went like this:

Act I, Scene I: Anthony Richardson, after showing some signs of development in training camp so far, trots out to the huddle as the starting quarterback in the Colts first preseason game.

Act I, Scene II: Richardson completes two of his first three throws for 21 yards.

Act I, Scene III: Then he gets hurt.

Act I, Scene IV: Cut to Colts coach Shane Steichen, everyone in the organization and every Colts fan watching at home screeching, "Not again!"

Yes. Again.

This time it only took seven minutes and change for Richardson to go down, courtesy of some kind of weird horsing around with the Colts O-line by Steichen and Co. and, perhaps, Richardson's failure to recognize a blitz scheme. In any event, Ravens linebacker David Ojabo blew in untouched and turned Richardson into roadkill -- after which Richardson got up and noticed the pinky finger on his throwing hand was engaged in some unauthorized geometry.

In other words, it was sticking out at a 90-degree angle.

The verdict: Dislocated. Out came AR, in went Daniel Jones for a not-particularly-inspiring 10-of-21, 144-yard, zero-score effort.

The only new wrinkle in this same old story is Richardson may be ready to play again as soon the Colts' next game a week from tomorrow. It is, after all, only a pinky finger, and the trainers popped it back into place when he came to the sideline. Tape it up and he could (should?) be good to go again.

But, geez. Way to get off to another not-flying start, Horseshoes. And way to keep the creativity in cold storage, Mr. Script Writer.

Seriously. Get some new material, everyone.

Strange days

 And this is America, 2025:

Green dildos flying out of the stands at WNBA games.

Some social media warrior claiming he and his pals are doing it to promote their crypto business.

An offshore betting site creating a market around the stunt, offering users prop bets on when and where the next dildo fling would happen, and what color the dildo would be.

I am not making any of this up. These things are happening.

The dildos are flying. An anonymous source whose internet handle is a character in a Quentin Tarantino film told ESPN his group is responsible and, by the way, how 'bout investing in our crypto coin? And a betting site in Panama is indeed tapping into Dildogate to claim its piece of the pie.

And this is America, 2025. Love it or say, "What the actual (bleep)?"

Me, I more and more feel like Col. Kurtz at the end of "Apocalypse Now," except I'm not mumbling, "The horror ... the horror ..." I'm mumbling, "The weirdness ... the weirdness ..."

And it's not just Dildogate, which gets weirder by the minute.

It's surfing the web the other day and seeing some hard-right loon in the Wall Street Journal claiming Caitlin Clark's civil rights are being violated because all those mean black girls in the WNBA are picking on her because she's white.

It's Major League Baseball playing a game in the infield of a NASCAR race track because ... oh, hell, just because.

It's the Department of Homeland Jackbootery pumping out a graphic for its "Speedway Slammer" immigrant gulag that features an IndyCar with the number 5 on it -- which happens to be the car number of Pato O'Ward, the only Mexican driver in the IndyCar series. 

None too subtle, these folks.

Strange days, here in America 2025. Bigotry and weirdness and naked greed gleefully held up as virtue while what we used to regard as virtue -- honesty, propriety, mutual respect and plain old common decency -- fall out of favor.

Dildogate, for instance, is nothing but misogyny as a sick lounge act. But sure enough, in America 2025, someone figured there was a buck to be made off it.

And the most heinous part of that?

They were right.

According to ESPN, a Forbes value tracker has seen the price of the aforementioned crypto coin spike 300 percent in the last week. And searches for "green dildo" on Google Trends have increased 3,700 percent since July 29.

Strange days. Strange country.

Hoosier hospitality, or something

 When I heard the news I jumped on my handy map app to trace the route, just to see if  Kristi Noem -- aka the Magda Gerbils of Homeland Security; aka Armband Barbie -- was as empty-craniumed about geography as she is about everything else.

Here's what I found: Speedway, In., is 78 miles from Miami County. It's a tad under an hour-and-a-half shot down U.S. 31 from one to the other.

But, sure, let's call the proposed Miami County site for Indiana's very own immigrant concentration camp the "Speedway Slammer," even if the Speedway in question is nowhere close. Cutesy names for ICE hellholes are Magda's thing, after all, and never mind the false advertising and grotesquery of it. That's for the little people to fuss about.

Besides, check out the alliteration! Why, how clever of her!

Aye-yi-yi. It's the lunatics' world now, and we're all just livin' in it.

This latest hits a trifle close to home, though, which means I'm gonna shake my bony fist about it for awhile. So, in its way, did the Indianapolis Motor Speedway when it got word of Magda's latest brain spasm. IndyCar pumped out a statement to the effect that this sure as hell wasn't IndyCar's or IMS's idea, and they had nothing whatever to do with it. In fact, no one even gave them a heads-up about it.

Which makes the Blob wonder if the lawyers are about to get involved.

In any case, as someone who's bent a knee to IMS for most of my 70 years, Magda's implicit linking of the Speedway to her Regime's mindless cruelty pisses me right off.  This isn't some quaint little bullring we're talking about, after all. It's Motorsports Valhalla, 116 years of tragedy and triumph and innovation, a monument to both the folly of man and his genius. 

Ghosts and history walk the grounds here, and you can feel both pressing close when you walk out of the place in May with the day's light beginning to soften. The past overlays the present like a double image then, Shaw and Vukovich and all the rest thundering through eternity in your head.

God. I do so hate it when I get maudlin.

But I am helpless against that affliction when it comes to the Speedway, so there you go. Magda and the rest of the soulless creatures can sit on it and rotate. You want to plunk down one of your gulags in my state -- and how long before they franchise them, Kristi's Kages For Scary Brown People or some such thing? -- at least show some damn respect. The Speedway is a state icon, and not to be trifled with.

Besides, there are closer places whose image to exploit.

South Bend, for instance, is seven miles closer to Miami County than the Speedway, according to my app. And Notre Dame is there.

Notre Dame! Why, I can see it now: Rockne's Rockpile. Or Hanratty's Hoosegow. Or Fair Catch Corby's Colditz For Carlos.

Of course, you involve Notre Dame, you risk involving the Pope. And he's definitely not down with this vile business.

Oh, yeah? Well, alliterate THIS, I imagine His Holiness saying.

Oh, wait. That's what I would say.

History's eddies

 Eighty years ago today the United States ushered in the Atomic Age, a phrase that might sound celebratory but hardly is intended to be. Atomic-wise, after all, a lot of stuff has happened since we incinerated Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945, and very little of it's been good.

It does, however, give the Blob an excuse to go Full History Nerd on y'all. Those with no stomach for such outbursts are hereby excused, per usual.

That first atomic bomb killed an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 Japanese outright, with 90,000 to 166,000 dead from radiation poisoning by the end of 1945. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second A-bomb on Nagasaki, adding another estimated 39,000 to the immediate death toll and 70,000 by the end of the year.

This of course doesn't include the untold thousands who died from radiation-related cancers in the decades after. It does, however, fuel the continuing debate over whether the atomic bomb saved more lives than it ended by (at least allegedly) forcing Japan to sue for peace.

The Blob's position is the debate likely will go on until judgment trump. And I take that position because history's eddies are unfathomable even to the most elevated human minds, for the simple reason that what didn't happen, and what it would have changed, is forever unknowable. We can only forever guess, and we'd likely be wrong.

What didn't happen in this case, of course, is Harry Truman saying, "Hell, no, we're not gonna drop that thing." What didn't happen is the more fanatical elements of the Japanese regime successfully pulling off a coup and taking Japan into a final apocalypse that would have killed millions who wouldn't have otherwise died.

And who therefore didn't otherwise die.

Now, was this solely because of the 70,000 to 80,000 who died in Hiroshima on August 6, and the 39,000 who died three days later? Would the lives of  hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, and millions of Japanese, have ended in an invasion of the home islands had those 119,000 or so lives not ended on August 6 and August 9?

Impossible to know, again. Those historical eddies are filled with contorted oxbows and odd meanderings, and they are shaped by everything that happens or doesn't happen, no matter how seemingly inconsequential.

And so it could well be that obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and ushering in a time when mankind at last was capable of completely destroying itself, was the coup de grace. Or maybe it was the Soviets' invasion of Manchuria -- which began on the very day Nagasaki was irradiated, and decimated the last fully intact Japanese army.

Or maybe it was both.

But would either alone have been enough to drive Japan to the table, especially for the hard-liners?

History's eddies, forever answering questions with more questions.

Next man up

 ... is Anthony Richardson, it seems.

It's his turn in the barrel, to put it another way.

It's his turn in the Scrutiny Room under the merciless glare of a single white light, Shane Steichen grilling him like a tuna: Are you ready NOW, AR? Are you? Are you? Are-

OK. So that's getting a wee melodramatic.

Still, the quarterback competition is some kind of on for the Indianapolis Colts, and Richardson gets the first audition after being named the starter for the Horsies' preseason opener at Baltimore tomorrow. Then it'll be Daniel Jones who'll be the next man up, or in the barrel, or being sweated in the box by Det. Pembleton.*

(*Rando reference to the 1990s David Simon vehicle "Homicide: Life On The Street." Best cop show ever and don't waste your breath arguing otherwise.)

And here we pause to try to answer the unanswerable.

Which is, of course, how we got to a place where Anthony Richardson suddenly is fighting for his job with Daniel Jones. Daniel Freaking Jones, for crying out loud.

"You mean the same Daniel Freaking Jones who got run out of New York because he was spectacularly underwhelming as a quarterback?" you're asking now. "The same Daniel Freaking Jones who once was benched for Tyrod Taylor, who in turn got hurt and was replaced by a kid from the neighborhood named Tommy DeVito?"

The very one.

Now the Colts regard him as even-steven with Richardson, which boggles the mind in ways no mind should ever be boggled. Two years ago, after all, the Colts snatched Richardson with the fourth pick in the 2023 NFL Draft, and everyone was declaring him a New Prototype For A New Quarterbacking Age, an absolute platinum-grade athletic freak who would lead the Colts back to glory.

Two short years later, he's battling Daniel Jones for his job. Excuse me, Daniel Freaking Jones.

This after the Colts threw AR into the fire right from the get-go, a horrendously awful decision that has practically ruined the kid and led the franchise to this sad pass. Richardson was, after all, a month shy of 21 when the Colts drafted him. He was just three years out of high school, and he'd started all of 13 college games at Florida. How the Colts braintrust (so-called) thought he was ready to be a starting quarterback in the NFL -- especially for a team that had gone 4-12-1 the season before -- remains a mystery of the age.

Me, I'm thinking magic mushrooms might have been involved.

Anyway, Richardson started, got hurt, started again in 2024, got hurt again. Came back, got benched for 147-year-old Joe Flacco. Replaced Flacco, got hurt again. 

At some point along this bumpy way, he was deemed immature and unready, as if those were startling revelations. Of course he was immature and unready. Well, duh, and all that.

So now he's battling Daniel Jones, words that will always be almost impossible to write no matter how many times we're compelled to write them. It's a desperate franchise's last desperate attempt to save AR (and themselves) from the dreaded B-word -- the word, of course, being "bust."

Decent young man that he is, here's hoping that doesn't happen. Here's also hoping the Colts give up on him, because only then will the decent young man have a shot at proving he's everything the Colts said he was before they got their buttery fingers on him.

Maybe he and Caleb Williams up in Chicago can manage to escape together.  "The Shawshank Redemption" as a buddy film, anyone?

Haters gonna ...

 Well. You know the rest of that one.

Twice now in the last few days drooling imbeciles have thrown what the media delicately calls "sex toys" on the floor at WNBA games, because ... well, because they're drooling imbeciles. The Blob, less constrained, will identify the "sex toys" by their proper name, which is "dildos." Green ones.

I have no clue as to the significance of the green part.

As to the significance of the dildo part, it seems at least marginally obvious: Women shouldn't be playing basketball. They should be where they belong, in the bedroom (and, of course, the kitchen).

That throwing a dildo on the floor might also be a particular, and particularly weird, swipe at the WNBA's gay players is also a possibility. Of course, I'm just spitballing here. I confess I'm woefully inadequate at divining the motives of anyone who'd throw a dildo at basketball players.

What I do know is this: You don't have to dig very far to expose the misogyny in a certain species of male. It's their default setting, and, if they're sometimes skillful at hiding it, the current political zeitgeist has made that skill increasingly unnecessary. If they think women should be kept barefoot and pregnant, they can come right out and say so now.

Women who challenge such notions, of course, are simply dismissed as "nasty" -- you-know-who's favorite adjective for women who are smarter than he is, more accomplished and not properly worshipful.

So, yeah, throwing dildos at women whose league has become a hit (and who don't give a tinker's damn what the Nasty Woman crowd thinks) was perhaps inevitable. Haters gonna hate, and murky brainpans gonna murk. Or something like that.

And at the risk of stereotyping myself ...

According to my friend and former colleague Michael Rothstein of ESPN, police in Georgia have arrested a suspect in one of the dildo-throwing incidents. He's 23 years old, and his name is Delbert Carver.

Delbert.

Of course.

Moneyed interests

 I once covered a high school football game at a venue so humble you had to climb a ladder to reach the press box.

I wasn't entirely sure a good clap of thunder wouldn't send the whole thing tumbling to the ground, and me with it. Non-fans of my work would no doubt have said, "At last, no more snooty Civil War references."

On the other hand ...

 On the other hand, I've also covered high school football games in gleaming palaces that would put a Division II college program to shame. So I guess you could say I've seen the yin and the yang of what the Friday night lights will illuminate in places that don't have money to burn, and in places that do.

Let's talk about the latter.

Let's talk, specifically, about Buford High School in Buford, Ga., where the school system just unveiled new digs for its powerhouse football program. This quaint little joint seats 10,000, features a 3,500-foot video board and includes 15 luxury suites and a two-story fieldhouse with locker rooms. Total cost: $62 million.

Now, I get it. Southerners love football the way a couch potato loves a party-size bag of Lay's Cheddar and Sour Cream chips. There are high schools in Texas, for instance, who have football stadiums even more over-the-top than Buford's. It's the sort of in-your-face conspicuous consumption people indulge in when they have with more money than sense, and think Andrew Carnegie was a putz for investing his pile in libraries.

Aw, HELL, no. Bring on the luxury suites, baby! 

I say this, of course, not knowing just how much dough circulates through Buford, a leafy Atlanta suburb. And if there was money left over from Go-Route Versailles to also fund (suck on this, Andrew!) a spectacular library.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the well-heeled Buford citizenry belatedly realized the football program was attached to a school, and so all that education junk had its place, too. As long as it didn't get in the way of Billy "Phasers On Stun" Beauregard carving up the two-deep on Friday night, why not?

So, yeah, I'm sure there are legit scholars at Buford, and I'm equally sure they aren't lugging around textbooks held together with duct tape or using school supplies their teachers had to burn a couple paychecks to buy. That's the reality in too many places -- and it will only get worse as legislators continue raiding the public schools to subsidize huckster charter schools, and to ensure Bentley J. Bentley III won't have to touch the principal to keep young Chip or Skippy away from the public school riffraff.

(He said, as the son, nephew and cousin of public-school educators, and as a public-school kid myself. Just so you know where I'm coming from here.)

Anyway, moneyed interests will spend their money on what interests them, and in Buford, Ga., that's football. You can say it's outlandish and self-indulgent and an almost comic misplacement of priorities, but no one ever said folks with eff-you money were known for their taste, self-awareness or restraint. 

For instance, check out that gilded monstrosity of a ballroom Our Only Available President wants to attach to the White House. It would ruin the intended austerity of the grounds, but what the hell. It's not as if the Prez and his missus haven't already paved over the Rose Garden, and infested the Oval Office with so much tacky gold leaf it looks like a Turkish brothel now. All that's missing are the under-age harem girls.

But I digress. If only a little.

Point is, the good folks of Buford can pour all the money they want into an extracurricular activity, simply because they can. And I can be the scold who'll always wonder what some cash-strapped public school system could do with that $62 mill -- and also if the  pressbox in the new stadium will come with a ladder.

If so, it better have gold leaf. I have standards, too, you know.

Nature's verdict

 Well, let's face it. 'Twas an odd idea to begin with.

A major-league baseball game at a NASCAR race track? Who thinks up these things, anyway, and why does he or she still have a job?

Because, listen, NASCAR and baseball have at least as little in common as the London Symphony Orchestra and your burnout neighbor kid's garage band, but never mind that. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, possibly high on some energy drink/essential oil hybrid, said, "Imma do it anyway." And behold it came to pass.

 Behold, Saturday night rolled around, and here were your Cincinnati Reds and Atlanta Braves, showing up to play a game on a baseball diamond laid out, somehow, in the infield of Bristol Motor Speedway in eastern Tennessee. Johnny Bench, representing the Reds, and Chipper Jones, representing the Braves, threw out the first pitch. Then NASCAR drivers Kyle Busch and Chase Elliott threw out other first pitches.

Then God or Noah or someone said, "Nah."

Dialed up a biblical deluge, someone did, and a mess ensued. Bats slipped out of players' hands. Puddles formed on the makeshift playing surface. The Field of Gearhead Dreams, or however it was styled, quickly became a potential Field of Bream, suitable only for casting and reeling. Why, just look at that big'un hiding out there behind second base!

At any rate, after one inning, MLB gave up the ghost. Suspended the game until this afternoon, when they're hoping for better weather.

By that time the fans in attendance had already sat in the rain for 2 1/2 hours, waiting out a delay that happened before the first pitch was even thrown, and then a second delay. 

In the meantime, MLB tried to make it an Event. There were food trucks and a Ferris wheel and batting cages and live music. Tim McGraw and Pitbull performed. The players rode around Bristol's notorious oval in the back of pickup trucks with their uniform numbers on them. For about half a minute it didn't seem weird at all, playing a baseball game in the infield of a racetrack.

Just guessing here, but they likely picked Bristol not only because it would be an MLB game in a state that doesn't have major-league baseball, but also because it's one of the few NASCAR venues where the fans sit right on top of the racetrack. And even at that, visual evidence seemed to show a fair amount of the seating was ridiculously far away from the infield diamond.

But, hey. It was new, it was different, and, even if nature seemed to render a thumbs-down verdict yesterday, maybe today they'll play a major-league baseball game at Bristol Motor Speedway. And Rob Manfred -- baked to the gills this time on Jolt Cola and deep-fried Double Stuf Oreos -- will be on to his next curious notion.

How about an MLB game in the infield at Churchill Downs? Or on Centre Court at Wimbledon? Or somewhere on the grounds of Augusta National?

Pete Crow-Armstrong patrolling Amen Corner. Paul Skenes throwing BBs from the 13th green. Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani swatting balls into the azaelas.

Ground-rule double if they land there on the bounce. Home run on the fly.

And free ambulance service for all those fossilized coots in their green member jackets, who surely would be stroking out at such blatant sacrilege.

Whatta you say, Rob?

Offing the messenger

 So it's been a couple of days since the President of the United States banished one of his vassals for giving him bad news about jobs, and, no, I'm not marveling at the gossamer thinness of the presidential skin. Nor am I wondering what he would have done to a certain boy in that famous (and newly relevant) tale about the Emperor's fake clothes.

The former is old news. The latter ... well, I figure he'd have sent the young teller of unfortunate truths to Sunshine Sobibor or some other fascist theme park. No wondering required for that.

No, I'm not wasting time on the obvious. I'm considering how the President's latest imperial wizardry could be transformed into a lucrative reality show -- a tip of the cap to the Prez himself, who once starred in his own.

I'm calling mine "Off The Messenger", and I'd pitch it to The Ocho, home of professional pillow fighting and other choice delights. Every week some poor slob would deliver an inconvenient truth to some completely detached-from-reality lunatic, and the lunatic would fire the poor slob or administer some other suitable punishment.

Why, just imagine the possibilities ...

Season One, Episode One: A Rockies Road

In the opener, the Colorado Rockies front office insists the club is getting better, developing new talent, building toward a future so bright they've gotta wear shades. Why, just look, in the last ten games, the Rockies have won five of them. That's half, by golly!

At which point one of the batboys points out the Rockies are still 50 games under .500 and a million light years out of first.

He's immediately demoted to Used-Jock Collector and staked out where the Rockies can hit line drives at his head.

The little smartass just laughs.

"Safest place in the ballpark!" he  cracks.

S1, E2:  Par For The Course

Tearing a page from the President's book, edible eraser mogul Burlingame J. Furlingame IV, 88, claims to have shot a 59 at Pinehurst and therefore was crowned the club champion for the 22nd straight year.

His caddy reminds him that his home course is not Pinehurst  but the Golden Walker Mini-Golf And Shuffleboard Emporium, and his latest score was 159, not 59.

"Why, you lying little whelp!" Burlingame cries, waving his cane and demanding the offender be shot at dawn for spreading harmful falsehoods about pillars of American manhood.

S1, E3: Milking The Moment

For the 23rd straight year, Paul Tracy insists he won the 2002 Indianapolis 500, and that means Helio Castroneves is only a three-time winner, not a four-time winner, and anyone who says otherwise is lying, lying, ly-

Oh, wait. That one's already been done.

S1, E 4: Ropin' Lombardi

For the 30th straight year, Jerry Jones insists the Dallas Cowboys WILL SO hoist the Lombardi Trophy at the Super Bowl, and anyone in the organization who so much as CLEARS HIS THROAT when Jerry says this will be banished to Cleveland or Jacksonville or-

Oh, wait. That one's already been done, too.

And last but not least ...

S1, E 5: A Horse Is A Horse

Breathable swimwear mogul Wellington Sterlington Livingstone III, 91, says his prize thoroughbred, Cornerstone, won the Kentucky Derby "three or four times," outran Secretariat head-to-head and beat Whirlaway in the 1985 Belmont Stakes to win a record fifth Triple Crown.

A groom then reveals Cornerstone ran so far back in his only stakes race he finished the next day, and that he was stuffed in 1975 but the staff put him back in his stable so the boss would think he was still alive.

"Why, you lying little whelp!" Wellington Sterlington cried, waving his oxygen tank and demanding the offending groom be drawn and quartered for spreading harmful falsehoods about a pillar of American horseflesh, and also for voting for a Democrat in the last election.

A trading post

 Comes now that time of the baseball season (The Day After The Trade Deadline in official title-dom) when the Blob pauses for a brief spasm of self-indulgence, which is to say crabbing about my Pittsburgh Cruds and their never-ending pursuit of irrelevance.

And, yes, I can hear you already with the usual "Nobody cares about your stupid Pirates", and your "We gotta listen to this AGAIN?", and also your "Oh, no! Not another brief spasm of self-indulgence!"

My response to that is, get bent. Here's a hall pass. Go wherever you go when the Blob escapes the Sportsball World compound to contemplate the lunacy that is the United States of 'Merica in 2025.

Me, I'm gonna bitch about my Cruds.

Who once again contributed to baseball's under-privileged by dealing David Bednar to the New York Yankees for some magic beans and three, ahem, "prospects."  In return, the Yankees got a pretty-darn-good closer -- a former All-Star, even -- who has 17 saves and 51 strikeouts in 38 innings work.

He's given up 32 hits, two home runs and 10 earned runs in those same 38 frames, and his ERA is 2.37.

These are admittedly not lights-out numbers, but Bednar wasn't pitching for a lights-out team. He was pitching for the Cruds, currently cemented in the NL Central cellar with a 47-62 record. And that's after going 8-2 in their last 10 games and reeling off five straight wins.

Anyway, they're still 17 1/2 games behind the front-running Milwaukee Brewers, and 7 1/2 games out of next-to-last. So off Bednar goes to the Yankees, and off starting third-baseman Ke'Bryan Hayes goes to the division rival Reds.

"Does this mean the Cruds, er, Pirates are giving up on the season, Mr. Blob?" you're saying.

Nah. They gave up on the season in spring training, same as they do every year after craftily avoiding spending money all winter. Other teams are occasional trading posts; the Cruds are a trading post, in the sense that they're an insensate piece of wood that never moves. Their cheapskate owner -- we'll call him "Bob Nutting" -- seems content to collect revenue-sharing dough and milk what he can from one of the prettiest venues in the majors (PNC Park), all while operating his club as a sort of farm-team-to-the-stars.

Send us your "prospects," we'll develop 'em. Then we'll send 'em back to you when they get good enough to command real money. That's the deal.

Hence, goodbye Bednar (and Hayes). Hence, goodbye Oneal Cruz and maybe even Paul Skenes down the road, although those two seem to be the Cruds' only untouchables right now.

Untouchability, of course, being both relative and fluid where the Cruds are concerned.

"You sound bitter, Mr. Blob," you're saying now.

Who, me?

Nah, I'm not bitter. I'm just resigned. Also I wish Roberto Clemente would come down from his heavenly abode and start swinging a bat at a few heads while shouting "These are the Pittsburgh Pirates, you damn fools! The Pittsburgh Pirates!"

Which I guess means I'm deranged as well as resigned. Ah, well.

Summer's shortening arc

 The Chargers play the Lions tonight in the Hall of Fame Game, and again I think what I always think: "What, already?"

I mean, this can't be the beginning of the NFL hogging every Thursday night until literally next year, can it?

Heck, the Rockies haven't even lost 100 games yet. How can summer be on the wane?

But then I look at the calendar, and see that, yes, August begins tomorrow. Which means high school football is only three Fridays off, and kids head back to school in these parts a week from today.

A week. From. Today.

The arc of summer shortens with every year. Or so it inevitably seems when you've seen 71 of them, and remember when summer stretched all the way from Memorial Day to Labor Day and didn't cheat us out of a whole month.

Now?

Now summer is June and July, and then here comes the NFL and school starting up again, and even though the celestial calendar says there are still six weeks or so left until fall,  it feels like summer is done like dinner. The neighborhood baseball diamonds stand empty. The back-to-school sales are at flood tide. The other day I walked through some big-box store and saw candy corn for sale, and gold-and-orange wreaths decorated with pumpkins on display.

And I realized summer had slipped out the back way when I wasn't looking.

Good lord, wasn't the MLB All-Star Game -- the Mid-Summer Classic -- just a couple of weeks ago? (It was). Wasn't the Fourth of July yesterday? (Seems like it was). And when did I get so damn old I started crabbing about how BACK IN MY DAY summer lasted longer than the Punic Wars?

Because it did. No, really. 

Now, don't get me wrong. I love the fall. I love everything about it: Cool evenings and crystalline blue-sky days and football Friday nights. I love cider. I love donuts. I love the first time you step outside and there's a chill in the air, and you realize it's time to break out the Whatsamatta U. sweatshirts again.

I love fall almost as much as I loathe Dryer-Vent Season in summer -- you know, those several weeks when you step outside and it feels like you're standing in front of a dryer vent. On those days, I want fall to begin yesterday.

But last night it rained and today a front's supposed to blow Dryer-Vent Season back to hell where it belongs, and tonight the Chargers scrubs do battle with the Lions scrubs. And the other night I was sitting out on the deck, and a parade of kids on bicycles went by -- four, five, six of them riding nose-to-tail -- and it felt like a celebration of sorts, one last salute to summer before it ends.

Or maybe that was just my imagination running away from me again.

Running away like summer, you might say.

Wrasslin' with image

 It was all just a bizarre coincidence. No, really. Bring me a stack of that book the President of the United States has never read and I'll swear on it.

I will swear, so help me God, that the other day when I made an offhand reference to the WNBA getting perilously close to WWE country, I did NOT know there was someone out there who actually wants to do that. 

Well, sort of.

Here's the deal: As reported on the website Awful Announcing, last week the co-founder and owner of Women Of Wrestling, Dave McLane, said he'd love so see Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever step into the ring at one of his event. And then Jeannie Buss of the Los Angeles Lakers, the other WOW co-founder, said she'd love it, too.

Now, if you don't know who Sophie Cunningham is, you've either been living in a snowdrift in the high Andes or you're still operating on dial-up. Cunningham, see, is that tall blonde looker you see showing up for games in alarmingly short skirts, and who functions as Caitlin Clark's oncourt muscle. Think Luca Brasi, only with better legs.

Mess with Caitlin, Sophie messes with you. She can also play a little, which doesn't hurt.

The problem with that is every time Sophie messes with someone, she contributes to the widening perception that the WNBA is a goon league full of cheap-shot Betty Laimbeers. This is not to single out Cunningham, who has had lots of help in advancing that unfortunate rep. She's even been on the receiving end of the goonery on occasion.

However ...

However, when a huckster like McLane says she's "the Marty McSorley to Wayne Gretzky," that's a problem. Basketball is not supposed to be hockey, although occasionally (the 1990s NBA, ahem) it's looked as if it would like to be. And when you start comparing the WNBA's players to legendary NHL enforcers ...

Well. This is surely not the image league president Cathy Engelbert was banking on when Clark hit the WNBA like a whirlwind last summer and sent the league into the stratosphere in exposure and popularity. 

With added exposure comes added scrutiny, see, and that's veering increasingly toward a net loss for Engelbert and her league. Oh, they cashed in on the Caitlin Effect with a chunky new TV deal, but as more and more fans and media have tuned in, they've more and more not liked what they've seen.

The officiating, for one thing, is disturbingly wretched, an object of increasing ridicule and the main culprit in all the WWE stuff. Everyone's seen Clark get knocked around with impunity, in part because the camera's always on her. But she isn't the only high-end player subjected to the rough stuff, and it's become an annoying question that buzzes around Engelbert's head like a fly: Why doesn't your league better protect its stars? Is it because it can't, or it won't?

And now a couple of pro wrestling execs want to put one of your most visible players in the ring?

Sophie Cunningham in tights, bashing Hellzapoppin' Heidi or someone with a folding chair. Executing the Sophie Smash off the top rope to take out Valkyrie Val. Or how about an all-WNBA  grudge match between Sophie and the Queen of Mean, Joltin' Jacy Sheldon?

Oh, yes. That's just what the WNBA needs.

Not.

Lyin' down with dogs

 For the second time in as many weeks a Cleveland Guardians pitcher has been caught up in an online betting probe, and, like Claude Rains in "Casablanca," I am shocked, shocked. Imagine, gambling soiling our national game again. And after all that hoo-ha about the 1919 Black Sox, and also Pete Rose.

But star reliever Emmanuel Clase has been placed on leave just as starter Luis Ortiz was last week, and maybe the cases are related and maybe they aren't. All we know right now is Ortiz was flagged by "a betting integrity firm" (now there's an oxymoron for you) because of in-game prop bets on two pitches he threw back in June.

Apparently a whole pile of folks with their eyes glued to their betting apps dropped coin on those two pitches, which the Betting Integrity Firm noticed, flagged and sent on to MLB.

Me?

Right now I'm remembering an old saying: Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

By which I mean it's a lack-of-self-awareness world record for MLB to pretend to care about Betting Integrity when it's green-lighting the Oakland A's to become the Las Vegas A's a couple of years down the road. Or when it enters into a partnership with FanDuel, the official MLB online betting site.

That's a hell of a fence for baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and the gang to straddle, and perhaps only an absent self-awareness gene could make it possible. You'd think they'd want to get as far away from the gambling culture as possible, given baseball's traditionally severe stance post-Black Sox. But, nah. They're all in, as the saying goes.

There's money in them there prop bets, as the saying also kinda goes. So why not shrug at the jarring dissonance of promoting gambling while also condemning it?

And why get all righteous when you send such mixed messages to the players?

Do not bet on the game, gentlemen. That is the third rail of baseball. Betting on the game is very, very bad. Those who do it will be dealt with very, very severely.

Also, here's a sponsor patch from FanDuel. Make sure you display it prominently.

You can almost hear them saying it, can't you?

Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. Oh, you, um, bet.

And here are your winnings, Mr. Manfred.

Most Valuable Human

 Cancer took Ryne Sandberg from us yesterday, and if it's a cliche to say the world is a poorer place this morning because of that, I'm going to say it anyway.  Because the world is a poorer place because of it.

Every Cubs fan I knew wanted to be Ryne Sandberg in his salad days, see, or at least that's how I remember it. He could hit, he could field, and he was the very soul of a franchise that went to the playoffs twice in the 1980s after they'd been, well, the Cubs pretty much since the end of World War II. 

Which is to say, losers. Lovable sometimes, and merely losers at others. But consistent about it.

And then came Ryne Sandberg, sort of. Allow me to explain.

Begin with the fact that, in the 1982 trade with the Phillies that turned the Bear Cubs around, Sandberg was not the headline name. He was just a struggling kid in the Phillies' organization then, having gone 1-for-6 in his 13-game debut with the big club in '81. You couldn't quite call him a throw-in on the deal, but he wasn't Larry Bowa or Bobby Dernier or even Keith Moreland, the names in the trade everyone knew.

Sandberg?

Well, the '82 season would be his first full summer in the bigs. And he'd spend it in Wrigley Field, a circumstance that might or might not have been thick with portent. Because where do you suppose he got that one hit during his cup of coffee with the Phils in '81?

Thaaat's right, boys and girls. The Friendly Confines.

Anyway, here he came  along with Bowa and Dernier and the rest, working hard to learn his craft. And before long, Ryne Sandberg became, well, Ryne Sandberg.

He broke out for good in 1984, when he batted .314 with 19 home runs, 19 triples and 32 stolen bases and was the National League MVP. Hit two late jacks that summer to win what forever after would be known as The Sandberg Game. Led the Cubs to the playoffs for the first time since Andy Pafko was patrolling center field. 

They blew a 3-1 lead and lost to the Padres, of course -- hello, Leon "Wickets" Durham -- but they were no longer losers. In '89 they reached the playoffs again, as Sandberg batted .290 with 30 homers, 76 RBI and 301 total bases. By then, of course, he was no longer Ryne Sandberg but Ryno, and Mr. Cub to the Wrigley faithful in a way no one had been since the OG Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks.

Not that Ryno would have ever cottoned to such sacrilege.

What set him apart, always, was not just that he was good at everything on a ballfield, but that he was good at life, too. He was a family man who played the game with visible joy, and he was reflexively humble about it all. That he was also a notorious clubhouse prankster no one ever got mad at because of his incorrigible good humor and that damned smile of his was a testament to (for lack of a better term) his innate goodness.

He was a Most Valuable Player, and also a Most Valuable Human. Which is why, yes, every Cubs fan wanted to be him, and  why no opponent ever had a bad word to say about him anyone remembers.

In his later years he'd become a manager and a coach and mentor to the kids coming up, and none of them had anything bad to say about him, either, because he never talked down to them and always knew how to massage the flaws in their game.

Several of them said just that in Jesse Rogers' ESPN piece on Sandberg today. A pile of Ryno's contemporaries chimed in, too -- including Bowa, who remembered the way the young Sandberg used to come in early that first summer in Chicago to hit and hit and hit under the watchful eye of Cubs manager Jim Frey.

"I think about how handled himself when he first got called up," Bowa said. "He struggled out of the gate. I watched this guy not let it affect him. It might have affected him on the inside, but the way he handled himself on the outside was great."

Reading that takes me back my own Ryne Sandberg moment, which is actually not a Ryne Sandberg moment at all. It was actually a moment involving the man being quoted, Bowa, in the first days of those new-look Cubs of '82.

They opened that season in Cincinnati, where the Reds still traditionally kicked off Opening Day for all of major-league baseball. That was a big deal in those days, and so our paper -- the late, great Anderson (In.) Daily Bulletin -- always covered it.

So there I was, venturing into the visitors clubhouse because, let's face it, the new-look Cubs were the story that day. I wormed my way into the scrum surrounding Bowa, and asked him if, in addition to his obvious skills, if perhaps the Cubs traded for him because of his leadership abilities, too.

Larry didn't like that.

"What do you mean?" he snapped. "They got me because I can play! I can play!"

Young guy that I was, I thought it was a terrible thing, getting yelled at by Larry Bowa. Later, of course, I found out Bowa yelled at a lot of people in those days, and I felt somewhat better about it.

Know what I don't feel better about, on this day when all of baseball mourns an MVH?

That somewhere in that clubhouse was Ryne Sandberg, before he was Ryne Sandberg. And that, because he wasn't yet Ryne Sandberg, I never thought to seek him out for a comment. I might not have even known his name.

Sure do now, though. Sure do now.

Bubba

 It was Brickyard 400 weekend in Indy Saturday and Sunday, and damned if I forgot about it until the weekend was upon us. This either speaks volumes about my old-man brain, or about the Brickyard's diminished status in the motorsports firmament.

A bit of both, I'm thinking.

Oh, NASCAR still hypes the Brickyard as one of its official Crown Jewels, but that feels  like hollow courtesy these days. Sunday, a half-empty IMS spoke louder. In front of all those closed-off grandstands and here-and-there clumps of breathing humans, it felt like just another stock car race.

Until Bubba Wallace happened.

The man in the livery of Michael Jordan's race team had won a handful of Cup races, but he'd never won anything like the Brickyard 400. Yet there he was at the front of the field as the laps peeled away Sunday, trying to hold off onrushing defending champion Kyle Larson and stretch his last tank of gas to the finish at the same time.

And then ...

And then it rained. With six laps to go.

The red flag came out two laps later, and there we were, four laps to run and the field sitting in line in the pits for 18 minutes that must felt to Wallace like 18 centuries. The track was dried, the field ran the remaining four laps under yellow while Wallace's gas gauge trembled, and it was on to one of those damnable green-white-checker finishes.

(Why four laps under yellow before dropping the green, you ask? I don't know. Made zero sense to me, but I wasn't trying to manufacture a green-white-checker finish like NASCAR so clearly seemed to be doing. They're big into that sort of manipulation, it seems.)

Anyway, the green dropped, Wallace sailed away and, sure, of course, two numbskulls ran into each other behind him, bringing on a second green-white-checker. By this time it felt as if the racing gods had it in for him: Think you're gonna win, Bubba? Ha! We'll make it rain, then we'll make a couple of numbskulls run into each other, and, oh, by the way, how's your fuel situation?

Which is where history itself stepped in with a reply: Just fine.

Just fine, because the green dropped again, Wallace fled again, and this time there was no catching him. A couple of laps later he was crossing the yard of brick under the checkered flag, and the Brickyard 400 had the sort of moment for which it had been starving for years.

Bubba Wallace,  Brickyard champion. Bubba Wallace, first black driver in 116 years to win a race of any kind at the most iconic site in motorsports.

It was yet another historic moment at a place that breathes history like air because it has seen so much of it, and whose sustaining cache is that almost no other motorsports venue has seen more. It's gone from Harroun and DePalma and Milton and Lockhart to Arnold and Meyer and Shaw and Rose; from Vukovich to Ward to Foyt to all those Andrettis and Unsers.

Gordon and Earnhardt and Jimmie Johnson? Yep, they're in there. Schumacher and Barrichello and Hakkinen, too. Castroneves, Franchitti, Dixon, Guthrie, Patrick ... on and on it goes.

And now, Bubba Wallace. Who adds his own unique piece to a seemingly unending tapestry.

Racing gods and forgetful old men be hanged.

Happy-ness is a sequel

 Dialed up "Happy Gilmore 2" the other day in defiance of all the alarm bells clanging in my head, because the only thing in filmdom guaranteed to flop worse than a sports-movie sequel is a comedy sports-movie sequel. 

It's why you likely never saw "Major League 2" or "Major League 3," even though some lint brain in Hollywood green-lit those unfortunate projects. It's why you also likely never realized there were also three "Bad News Bears" movies in the original franchise, plus a 2005 remake of the original, plus a short-lived "Bad News Bears" TV series.

Many more sports-movie sequels never got made, on account of there was pretty much nowhere left to go at the conclusion of the original. "Rudy 2" would have been just Rudy Ruettiger making bank off what happened in the original "Rudy" for the rest of his natural life. And "Secretariat 2"? 

That might have been the first equine porn film, given it would just be endless shots of Secretariat at stud. "Seccy Does Claiborne Farm," roll tape.

However ...

However, "Happy Gilmore 2" works. And a lot of the reason it works is not because of Adam Sandler, but because Adam Sandler talked a number of golfing icons into poking fun at themselves in a frankly ridiculous (but hilarious) plot.

Is Jack Nicklaus in this thing, in other words?

You're damn right Jack Nicklaus is in this thing.

Are Rory McIlroy, Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka and Scottie Scheffler in it?

You're damn right they are.

Does Rory get hit in the 'nads in a batting cage (don't ask)? Does even the famously colorless  Brooks play along with the silliness? Does Verne Lundquist play Verne Lundquist to the hilt, and do Scottie and John Daly pretty much steal the film?

You're damn right they do.

The Blob will not be That Guy and throw out a bunch of spoilers, except to say Daly is priceless as a sort of couch-potato philosopher king and Scottie perfectly deadpans his famous brush with the law. But if Sandler gets his laughs, and Christopher MacDonald gets his flowers as Shooter McGavin, and the blatant parody of the Liv Golf Tour is fun, it's the golfers, and those in their orbit, who make "Happy Gilmore 2" worth the watch.

Heck. Even Brooks Koepka looked like he was having a blast.

Tour time!

 The Tour de France wraps up today with three short climbs up Montmarte in Paris, and what I know about that is my wife and stayed at the foot of it back in 2005 and found this humble little place halfway up the hill that became our favorite restaurant in Paris.

Other than that, I got nothin'. Or right next door to nothin'.

Truth is, I haven't paid much attention to the Tour de France since it was the Tour de Syringe and Lance Armstrong was the godfather of HGH or something close to it. Lance won the thing every year, it seemed, until it came out he was a stone psychopath bullying his teammates into injecting themselves with horse testicles or some such thing, and banishing those who refused.

All that was a long time ago, however. Now I read that today is the last stage of the 2025 Tour, and everything I know about it you could fit in the cheesy basket on the front of my old 26-inch Huffy -- the one with the cheesy white wall tires and the Chico Salmon baseball cards flapping in the spokes.

Tadej Pogacar will definitely not be riding a Huffy up Montmarte today, but he's almost certainly going to be cruising down the Champs Elysees as the king of the Tour when it's all over. He's got a comfortable lead on Jonas Vingegaard, and if he maintains it he'll be the Tour champion for the fourth time.

So who is Tadej Pogacar, you might ask?

(Or not. You may have already bailed on this post when you found out it wasn't about baseball, NFL training camps or ... NFL training camps. If so, go with God.)

Anyway, who is Tadej Pogacar?

Well, he's a 26-year-old Slovenian who's the new Lance Armstrong, presumably without the Michael Corleone gene. Last year he became only the third male bike racer in history to win the sport's Triple Crown, which means he won the Tour, the Giro d'Italia and the World Championships in the same year. He's also became the only bike racer in history to win the Triple Crown and two monuments in the same year, whatever the hell a monument is.

(Just kidding. Monuments are other notable bike races. In Pogacar's case, the Liege-Bastogne-Liege and the Giro di Lombardia, both of which he won in 2024.)

In any event, Pogacar is a heck of a bike rider. So here's to him, even if he won't be riding a 26-inch Huffy with whitewall tires.

But it would be cooler if he did, to quote Wooderson from "Dazed and Confused".